Single gene target bacterial identification. groEL gene sequencing for discriminating clinical isolates of Burkholderia pseudomallei and Burkholderia thailandensis.

Proper identification of Burkholderia pseudomallei and Burkholderia thailandensis is crucial in guiding clinical management of patients with suspected melioidosis, as more than 99% of cases of melioidosis are caused by B. pseudomallei, whereas B. thailandensis is only responsible for causing less than 1% of the cases. However, the difference between the 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences of B. pseudomallei and that of B. thailandensis is only 1%, and is therefore not discriminative enough for distinguishing the 2 species confidently. In this study, we amplified and sequenced the groEL genes of 7 strains of B. thailandensis and 6 strains of B. pseudomallei, and compared the sequences with 7 other groEL gene sequences of Burkholderia species. BLAST analysis revealed that the putative protein encoded by the groEL gene of B. thailandensis has 99.6%, 99.5%, 98.4%, 98.5%, and 96.5% amino acid identity with the groEL of B. pseudomallei, B. mallei, B. cepacia, B. vietnamiensis, and B. fungorum respectively. The amino acid sequences of GroEL of the strains of B. thailandensis and B. pseudomallei all showed >99.5% amino acid identity with each other. The nucleotide sequence of the groEL gene of any of the strains of B. thailandensis showed >99.8% nucleotide identity with that of any of the other strains of B. thailandensis, and the nucleotide sequence of the groEL gene of any of the strains of B. pseudomallei showed >99.5% nucleotide identity with that of any of the other strains of B. pseudomallei. However, the nucleotide sequence of any of the strains of B. thailandensis showed <97.6% nucleotide identity with any of the strains of B. pseudomallei. The amino acid sequences of GroEL of the 20 strains of Burkholderia species all showed >96% amino acid identity with each other. Furthermore, the nucleotide sequence of the groEL genes of the 2 strains of B. cepacia showed >99.5% nucleotide identity with each other, and the nucleotide sequence of the groEL gene of B. mallei showed >99.5% nucleotide identity with any of the strains of B. pseudomallei. The groEL gene sequence is therefore good for distinguishing between B. thailandensis and B. pseudomallei, and the GroEL amino acid and groEL nucleotide sequences of this single gene locus may potentially be useful for a 2-tier hierarchical identification of medically important Burkholderia at the genus and species levels respectively.